Chicago Public Square 2018 06 25

(2015 photo: Daniel X. O'Neil)

Planning an out-of town, post-Independence Day getaway from Chicago? Check your calendar.

I'm Charlie Meyerson with your Chicago Public Square Newscast.

Chicago's firebrand Father Michael Pfleger is planning to shut down the Dan Ryan Expressway the morning of July 7 with a protest march to demand more action against gun violence in Chicago. Pfleger tells the Sun-Times "Nothing else is working," so he's going back "to the playbook of the civil rights movement." Pfleger invites people to join him at the Ryan’s 79th Street entrance and walk about a mile and a half to the 67th Street exit ramp… to, as his Facebook page says, "disrupt the flow of traffic because gun violence has disrupted the lives of thousands of Chicagoans. … NO business as usual when children die in our streets." Again, that date is July 7.

As if it's not bad enough that Toronto often subs for Chicago in movies—including THE MUSICAL CHICAGO—there's this: CNet says Canada's largest metropolis is a dark-horse contender to win the bidding for a project Chicago would dearly love to land: Amazon's HQ2, which the company says would come with $5 billion in investment and 50,000 new hires.

Chicago Alderman Ed Burke is passing up a meeting with the Pope. He says he's not joining his wife on a trip to Rome, where the pope will honor the 50th anniversary of the Special Olympics his wife helped found. His reason? He doesn't want to ruin his perfect attendance at City Council meetings dating back to 1970.

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A call for reporters to suspend normal relations with the president. Widely respected New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen says Donald Trump's tenuous relation to the truth makes him a "bad actor" who can't be given "the benefit of the doubt," no matter what he says. And Rosen says that, even though presidents are NORMALLY quoted more than any other figure, journalists covering this president should do things like …

… Send only interns and inexperienced reporters to White House news briefings, so as not to lend anchor-level prestige to those events.

… Don't quote Trump just because he said something.

… Don't accept administration guests known to have lied.

… Decline to cover Trump events live (because he inevitably, Rosen says, spews lies)

I'm Charlie Meyerson and you’re listening to Chicago Public Square.